


Gaining Distance, Chasing Miles

by StrangerLoversLoseThings



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Abusive Sonia Kaspbrak, Aged-Up Character(s), Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Anorexia, Bad Parents Maggie & Wentworth Tozier, Big Gay Love Story, Bisexual Beverly Marsh, Bisexual Richie Tozier, Body Image, Boys Kissing, Bullying?, Child Abandonment, Child Neglect, Coming Out, Dreams and Nightmares, Eddie Kaspbrak Loves Richie Tozier, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, First Kiss, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Gay, Gay Eddie Kaspbrak, Gay Male Character, I will add more tags later, Implied Sexual Content, Losers Club (IT) Friendship, M/M, Making Out, Minor Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, No forgetting, Non-Graphic Violence, Period-Typical Homophobia, Physical Abuse, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Richie Tozier is a Little Shit, Rough Kissing, Running Away, Serious Injuries, Shoplifting, Slurs, Sonia Kaspbrak's A+ Parenting, They’re all 17-18, Underage Drinking, and the book - Freeform, and the miniseries, bev comes back, if you know stuff about it or reddie you’re good, kind of a mix between it 2017 movie
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-07-11 10:31:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19926640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StrangerLoversLoseThings/pseuds/StrangerLoversLoseThings
Summary: The Summer of ‘93 has begun, and Eddie Kaspbrak is having doubts. It’s been four years since the Pennywise attacks on Derry, and even as the anniversary of the Losers club’s trauma approaches, he can’t seem to stop thinking about a particular member he finds more and more intriguing with each passing year.Along side his friends, he’ll fight back against the town and the people who have already taken so much from him.And while he gains justice for his stolen childhood, maybe he can find a few other things along the way.





	Gaining Distance, Chasing Miles

**Author's Note:**

> Hi and welcome to Gaining Distance, Chasing Miles! Please refer to the end of chapter notes for comments on updates and story details. Enjoy!

It was eleven pm on a quiet Thursday. The date was June 6th, 1993. The day that proceeded this fateful night had been uneventful to the point of mild unease; the trees had blown in a faint breeze only once when a mail truck passed by, on its way to deliver to some anonymous client, turning right off of Porter street and on to Newark, exiting our story forever.

At half-past noon, two young children had kicked a ball back and forth in the street. No car had come and honked them out of the way, no elderly woman came out to scold them for being noisy, and neither of the children playing had scraped their knee nor caused any sort of commotion. Come three o’ clock on the dot, they had picked up their ball, and without so much as a friendly goodbye, pivoted around and walked in opposite directions down the street. After they left, Porter street was still again. It was as if the children had never really been there at all.

The day of June 6th, 1993 came and went just as the children down the street and mail truck ‘round the corner had. Uneventful, unassuming, untouched: the picture of a quiet street in a quaint little town. Now, even at nighttime, the street was much the same (for the most part, at least).

Three houses down, Mrs. Marry Manor sat drinking her way into her third divorce, 60 years old and unable to commit to anything other than a good bottle of brandy and her six cats (I’ll refrain from sharing their names), much less a husband.

Across the street, Mr. and Mrs. Smithy slept soundly, but in separate beds, their three children crowded around the tiny family TV until the wee hours in the morning.

And in the next house, the much-too-friendly owner of the Downtown Derry Pawn Shop, and in the next house, and the next...

It is at 412 Porter street, Derry MN., that our story starts. The mailbox outside, which was freshly painted mustard yellow, read in big curvy letters: ‘Kaspbrak’. This was indeed the Kaspbrak family home, although the family had thinned out quite a bit since it was first constructed way back when. Now it was home to only two, a mother and a son. They went by the names Sonia and Eddie Kaspbrak, who, by the looks of their house, was a perfectly normal, totally respectable single-parent household. If you had been passing down Porter street at eleven on this night, you wouldn’t have suspected them to be anything but just this. And his could you know, anyways? You wouldn’t have known that inside this tiny row house on Porter street, while Sonia Kaspbrak slept in her big double bed alone, snoring like a jet motor, only a floor above her, her precious son, Edward, was having a two-sided crisis.

He had been trying to fall asleep since he’d kissed his mom goodnight at 9 o’ clock sharp, after sitting through reruns of her favorite mindless television programs, pretending to be entertained for hours. The problem, though, wasn’t the show, precisely, or even how hot the room was with no windows open, or the suffocating way the house seemed to suck him in on a summer day with no windows open. No Eddie’s problem was that his mind was elsewhere. In two very different places, to be exact. Coincidentally, they were the very two places his mind was at that very moment, lying straight as a poker in bed with one hand wrapped tightly around his aspirator. Eddie was unable to focus then on his mother’s silly shows and now was unable to sleep because he couldn’t pull his brain hard enough back into the room with him for enough time for him to actually fall asleep.

See, Eddie, the poor boy, had not only one major problem, (he had many of these, some showing themselves more in particular later) but two. They were of complete opposite nature, and yet in some distant part of Eddie’s kind he supposed they must be intertwined in some way, although he couldn’t quite lay his finger on the point of junction.

Those problems were as follows:

Firstly: it was June, which meant it was almost August, which meant it had been nearly four years since he and his friends (The Losers Club, they had so fondly coined it), had defeated the demon entity that had murdered Bill’s, one of his closest friend’s, little brother Georgie. As the anniversary of their trauma inched closer, Eddie found himself growing more and more paranoid and restless. He chuckled slightly at himself, but without humor. Leave it up to him to worry about something that had kicked the bucket four years back. And It was dead, wasn’t It?

_Four years,_ thought Eddie. _Good God. Has it really been that long?_

It felt like just yesterday they had watched Bev put a stake through Pennywise’s head, had watched Mike push Bowers down the well, had watched as Richie Tozier, a great clown himself, announced that ‘ _he was going to have to kill this fucking clown’._ Now, at seventeen, Eddie still got chills, but for all the wrong reasons.

Ah, there it was. The second problem.

Secondly: Eddie kaspbrak was in love with his best friend.

Eddie had known he was gay for a few weeks now. And by a few weeks he meant since he was about 14 (he’d known long before then, but had refused to accept it at the time). But he had never actually told anyone, much less his best friend and lifelong crush.

It wasn’t that he worried they would hate him, exactly, Bev had come out as bi over the phone with them and all the boys had been pretty cool about it. Especially Richie, but in his own gross, harmless yet mildly offensive way. Eddie found himself blushing, and he felt quite stupid lying alone in bed at elven thirty at night blushing when he should have been trying to fall asleep.

No, that wasn’t quite what he feared.

What Eddie feared most was change. For Bev, it was easy. Bev was in Jersey, living her own life and growing into a woman without them. Bev didn’t have to look at each looser in the face every day, knowing that they knew something so intimate and personal about her. And Bev, was, well, Bev. She was smart, witty, pretty, and lovable. As Eddie grew older, he began to suspect he lacked some of these traits. He was smart, sure, but he didn’t get good grades like Ben or Richie did. He was still fire at comebacks, but even that would soon start to seem childish. He wouldn’t call himself pretty, either. _Sounds more like something the bullies would say,_ he thought incredulously. _Pretty boy._

And lovable, well, that one was tricky. Maybe that was the root of his problem. Was Eddie Kaspbrak lovable?

Soon he would be 18, like most of the other losers were already. He had graduated high school a week before beside them, the youngest of the lot (and of his grade, but that was beside the point. His mother had made him skip directly to first grade, not wanting to “burn him out before he was even a man”). Now it was Summer, and here he was, a closeted boy with an overbearing mother, a big-ass crush on his best friend, and no plans for college or the future.

The thing was, he wished he could tell his friends, but that would mean also telling Richie, which was not an option. He had briefly contemplated telling them all but Richie, but then he ran the risk of either seeming like he was lying to Richie, whom he was the closest to, or having him and the rest discover his no-longer-so-childish crush.

He and Richie shared everything with each other. It had been Eddie that Richie called the first time his parents drew blood while beating him. Eddie had come to Richie to talk about his fears when it came to Sonia’s recently more threatening outbursts. Eddie and Richie confided in one another in a way that neither of they could bring themselves to with any of the other losers. Maybe it was because they had known each other the longest, or maybe, just maybe, it was because of something more...

So, naturally, Eddie felt mildly guilty for not telling Richie the truth about his sexuality. He wasn’t ashamed, or scared that Richie would see him differently, but that some sixth sense in Richie would figure out his crush and then leave town without ever talking to him again. Richie’s 18th was approaching fast too, only a week before Eddie’s, so if he wanted to leave Eddie here it wouldn’t be a hard feat.

So Eddie had stopped hoping, or at least that’s what he told himself, and he agreed on two things: that he would never tell Richie he was gay, and he would never, ever, admit his crush in any way shape or form.

Or at least, that’s what he told himself.

**Author's Note:**

> Some of these chapters might be longer than others, and they will probably be posted a bit sporadically at first. I will get at least one out a week but if there’s more than I guess that doesn’t hurt either :p. I have the whole story planned out from here, but if you have any suggestions for scenes or edits I should do to the story please comment them! I will happily apply any feedback I receive, so thank you to anyone who does. This will not be much of a slow burn story (thank me later I hate slow burns for the most part), but there will be out-of-relationship conflict so be sure to read the tags for any warnings (and I’ll also put them at the beginning of chapters that apply). Thank you and happy Summer till the next update!
> 
> Ani


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